Tuesday, 30 March 2010

Each of the two adjacent clocks reads 3:27, but both are needed. One is large and has huge hands. It is intended for persons with poor vision. The other is tiny and has no hands at all. It tells the time only to the small white puffy clouds that float by in a large upturned basin of powder blue sky.

From far off in the woods that flank the upper left-hand edge of the mesa, a voice is heard, quite clearly, cutting across the fog of this early morning: a female voice quite easily understood: "I believe! I believe in you!"

Under the shadow of Duxbury Reef he is not really thinking. A moment of peace. He raises his hand in a gesture of blessing, made slightly silly by the impertinent grin on his face. Slowly the fog lifts as another timeless morning goes by.

The land, sprinkled with humble dwellings, slowly detaching from time, gradually falling off the cliff.

The young deer spend most of the day off in the bushes, watching the future studies cars go by from concealed positions. They dare to prance on the road and browse in the adjacent grasses only when there's no traffic. This occurs when the future takes a break.

"We were the first on the beach. The sets were rolling in at four to six, with occasional eight-footers. We waxed up and waited for a break."

The wet suits shine like black ceramics under a porcelain sky.

Each perfect day the same as every other perfect day. Some also imperfect. Nothing is ever anything but itself.

All of my friends are in another world.

Poetry: a whistling in the void, with fifty years spent listening for the echo.

Always important to keep old hat in closet and to forget location of closet. This a.m. as I run by, a great nation of pelicans fishing on the awakening lagoon.

The orange and purple flowers welcome you to town, Bolinas. The hummingbird bids you an all too soon farewell. Since your arrival so much, or little, time has gone by.

Puffy clouds, Bolinas: photo by blmurch, 2007

Fog lifting over Bolinas mesa, from the ridge: photo by blmurch, 2007Duxbury Reef at High Tide: photo by blmurch, 2007Falling trees on cliff, near Duxbury Reef: photo by blmurch, 2006Young fawn: photo by blmurch, 2007

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,At incredible speed, traveling day and night,Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.But will he know where to find you,Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;Birds darken the sky. Is it enoughThat the dish of milk is set out at night,That we think of him sometimes,Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

I have made the surprising discovery that cats are telephones that come and go as they please and have an appetite for milk and fish. It takes a while to understand that these are special beings, wireless phones like walkie-talkies; and that we too are special, in our imperceptiveness, because it took us so long to understand this.

Given that this state of misunderstanding goes back beyond antiquity, it's apparent that humans lack the code that would allow us to comprehend these messages, their origin, and the nature of those who are sending them to us. We don't know whose number is being called, or what the caller is trying to say...

Sunday, 28 March 2010

Coming around a cornerto one's first vistaof a big carbon extraction scenelike the Belle Ayr Minein Campbell County, Wyomingis like stumblinginto the Nile Valley during the building of the Pyramids

The Biggest Little Mine in the USA, 1978

Despite losing one-third of its productionduring an August conflagrationthe Belle Ayr operationstill sucked out 15 million tons

Gillette

Executive class townhouses are the first thing to grow out ofthe empty cliffs around Gillette since the inland sea left.The buffalo and antelope still play amid these grasslands,but they look a little diminished next to the Minoan scale of the open pit mines.

Population Control in Gillette

The coal trains go through all night longwith a racket like all of hell being unleashed as noise.A first, as you lie in bed in your motel room or mobile home,it merely disrupts your sleep, your nervous system. Later you kill your dog and wife.

Uranium District in Wyoming

Driving through the yellow scorched vastness of the Gas Hillsyou roll your windows up tight & try not to breatheany harder than that cow skull lying along the road is breathing. The road curves involuntarily into the Rattlesnake Range.

Jeffrey City

In Jeffrey City the snow piled up higher last winterthan anything in town except the CD sirens.But when the sirens sounded, it was good to know every web-hat in town could drive his house out from under it.

Wildcatters

Life along the Overthrust Belt is Lonely. Fours by fours withrifle racks, six packs, Willie & Waylon, Miller's & a shot can't defeat the ultimate meaning ofhaving to drive 200 miles in a different direction every morning to get to work.

Shoshoni

The '77 shootout at the Red & White Cabinstook more than the 2.8 lives the U-dust of 25 years ago snuffs every year. Besides these minesare safe now: says a nervous fire inspectorwho's waiting get this month's rad badgeback from OSHA, so he can work next month.

Wyoming

Perhaps it's because it's such a threatening spacewhat with its great expanse of unaffectionate skythat workers in this boom region travel fromjob to job with their housing intact& never further than ten feet behind them.

S.E. Wyoming

The great trans-synaptic stack flashersof the coal-fired electrical generating plantsthat tower over the Badlands across the Platte Rivermay provide useful power to all the Dakotas but to the traveler they are purely retinal messengers

"The clouds steely..."

The clouds steely off over the mesa to the Eastsuggest twisters in the Badlands have taken awaywhat was owed them by the pilgrims thereand now are moving off to test the northern settlers, or were those twisters we saw merely the swirl above the tipples?

They won't be there to pay if they can help it.There's no lack of character in fleeing in the teethof the prop wash, particularly since the new type of technological thresher advances only in reverse.

Worland

Coming down out of Ten Sleep Canyon into Worlandwhere they still haven't cleared the dust awayfrom last winter's thirty foot tall drifts which just melted down and left puddles ofeverything that blew through Worland since last Fall

Breakfast in Moorcroft

Where Ed stiffed on a rail crew thirty years ago, has a newcast of drifters now, not railroad but coal but equally transient, the only thing (pancake shop included) really localgoing on is the generally surrounding & impoverished Short Grasses

Grasses

The big bluestem has roots six feet deepIndian grass grows with the bluestem;switchgrass also ripples there in the wind.

Going west you get less rain:the little bluestem grows waist high, and so doesthe side oats grama, and the bearded needlegrass.

Further west, the short grass of the Plains grows:the blue grama, knee high; and the buffalograss, which grows up to the ankles.

"Grasses are a complex..."

Grasses make up a complex life which does not recoverso easily from mining and drilling as the apologists of"reclamation" would have us believe, it now turns out

Wanting to "improve" the land is always a hit or miss proposition depending on your definition of how saidland should be used

Checking Out

Across this whole part of the continental tableTime falls away & all that's left is the dusty light of motels in the West thirty years ago, laughter ofwomen somewhere off in the distance, cricketsin the violet dusk & a lonely horizontalityagainst which the beast shadows of the rigs are painted.

What the Pioneers Always Wanted To Do Was Arrive

Which meant getting across the mountains aliveBut then what? You lost track of the lessonsof the journey when the beginning fell out of sightbeyond the black unreeling truck lane of eternity

Out the window it helps to sing, Goodbye to the pronghorn, & the buffalodrops his shaggy head into the unreclaimed sageunremarking our mechanized passage

At times along the road from the mines into Gillette, Wyoming, you can spot grazing buffalo, their heavy blunt heads dipped to the purple sage, ignoring the 80 m.p.h. barreling of rush-hour pickups. It's that Wyoming time warp again: the past and the future, both incongruous in the hopelessly undiscriminating and democratic light of the present.

****

Gillette at night: the motel lady replies to a request for directions downtown with a scowl.

"You don't want to go there."

"Why, what's down there?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all you'd be interested in."

In the Center Bar, about a dozen taciturn workers and cowboys and two longhaired Indians are lined up on stools, impassively watching reruns of Earnie Shavers pounding on Ken Norton. On the jukebox in the background, Waylon Jennings explains how being crazy kept him from going insane. The lady bartender does double duty, pouring drinks and operating a package service out of a side window with a sliding panel of wood. Most of the faces framed when she opens the window seem young, bare and happy-drunk. It's Friday night. Their radios are loud.

The bar lady turns back to the bar to talk about working through the epic, minus 85 degree wind-chill nights and days of the winter just past.

"Oh, and of course we had a lot of snow," she says. "The coal mines and the oil rigs they just go on in any weather. They go right on working with whoever shows up, shorthanded. But back in January when it got at its worst, nobody came to work at all. So the oil people used helicopters. First time I ever saw that happen. They flew the boys out from Gillette in helicopters and then flew them back, just like over in Vietnam."

The jukebox stops playing and the talking lady's voice rings through the bar. A cowboy elaborately disengages himself from his bar stool and goes over to feed the jukebox money.

"Not much of a crowd," the bar lady says. "They're pullin' a lot of the rigs out of here."

"Oil people?"

"That's right. A lot of 'em are already gone. They're down in Wamsutter and Rawlins and over in South Dakota now."

"Do they come back?"

"Oh, sure, they'll be back up here in the fall." She laughs dryly.

"Oil people come and go?"

"Well, right now the boom's starting to fade in oil, so they're lookin' someplace else. But the coal, that's gettin' better and better. They've got three new mines goin' up right now, big ones. You aim to find work?"

"Could be."

"You won't have no trouble finding it around here."

****

A two-mile-long unit train runs on a new spur down an embankment. On the other side of the road, a dozen mule deer browse in the gentle wooded breaks. Down the road there's an ancient log-fenced homestead. The topsoil of the open pit mine has been dumped on both sides of the road into giant eroded mounds. A new freeway is being built next to the old road, along which the litter of cans and bottles is as dense as you'd find at Coney Island.

****

Saturday night in Gillette. The main drag's full of fair-haired kids, fat women and guys in webbed baseball hats. The back end of a magazine and souvenir store turns out to be a weapons depot. Big glass cases full of Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums, Ruger .44s, Colt .45s -- some of the biggest handguns in the movies.

Saturday afternoon at the Center Bar is watching two Indian girls beat the dickens out of two wildcatters in a game of nine-ball.

Wednesday, 24 March 2010

I know a man, in the west tooin Idaho, oh, there are indians therebut you've never heard of them, they're Bannocks and very poor, always were.Well, riches are obvious things and then it dependson what routes they were subsequently on.But this man, not the man I shall tellyou about later but another; a man named Swen, who came from Sweden to studythe languageand they asked him repeatedly --why he stayed so long (ten years).

Two months ago, in February, would you believe itthat far north the weather was so mild we could walk about the hills, slight snow on the groundand be very comfortable but maybe it was the firein our hearts because we were tramping for a housesite, one I knew I would never use, but the weatherI tell you was so perfect and the warmth of my friend was like the weather, all in February. Very far belowwas Pocatello, a miserable accidental town even theUnion Pacific abandoned in the forties. But the hillsand the moon at night on the snow all around that bowl and at night too Pocatello wasn't Pocatello but a jewelthe red and the blue, something you could never narrow downto gas in glass tubes. That afternoon with our backs restingagainst the vertical rocks there were... well I had to follow him there, to know land and love it, is a great thing fewpeople are as lost as I am. And I love this man because he loves Idaho.He wanted me to build a house somewhere near and I wanted tobut he you see, lives in a closed world but is very damn kind, he is very great I like him more than it is easy to sayand it wasn't easy to disappoint him, but I think he knew,he went on anyway describing the possibilities, that's love,in the mists of indifference. But I just can't build houses. At all. Although I dig the juniper and think the hills swing,you know how very much my world is not closed but open, open.Everywhere I am, I feel I am everywhere else. But that man in the sunlast February, with the western hat, and whom I shall not see for many years to come, the Idaho and the snow there and the hugepurple bitter juniper berries.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Some things remain true, as creation labours on. Sky's still up -- no, it's all around us. Or is that just fog, all colours perpetually dissolving, in it? Atmosphere too dissolving, then re-forming, all around, yet seldom seen, never quite touched. Just hanging there, this veil, ambient, bathing us. And then beyond, the bright half moon appears suddenly over the Bay, out of a deep blue-black night sky.

Days. An uncertain relation to time. And everything.

This atmosphere, transparent medium of souls. Carrier of the mystery, conduit for the dead to reach out and not quite touch us. Containing invisible particles, blown how many thousands of miles. Medium in which we are continually immersed, indispensable agency, instrument to the moment-by-moment maintenance of these awkward, unwieldy lives. A layer of gas which extends above the planet, following the global curvature. Sometimes producing a vaulted impression, made visible by stacked layers of cloud. A veritable ceiling sloping away in all directions around us, right on out to the horizon and beyond, over the ocean, where night starts falling. And never stops.

Another night, slowly scale the hill to where the view opens out over the Bay, distant glittering lights. Some of them perhaps moving, or is it just my eyes. One forty-five in the morning, Kensington Village. A soundless envelope, the emanation of rich people sleeping. Two large deer, full grown, appear, stock still, in the middle of the road. I pause. They pause. And leap the low metal road divider. And are gone. Into thin air, into the atmosphere.